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Bulgarian holidays & rhino-insertions

My sister just called and, in that faux-innocent tone that any sister recognizes as the sure sign of the younger sister’s looming instance of superior knowledge, she asked me if I knew about St Haralambos the patron saint of beekeepers. I thought about this, hard, because I normally have confidence in my mastery of that particular niche of hagiology. Was she referring to a radical misspelling of Saint Ambrose of Milan, the most commonly cited patron saint of beekeepers? No, she was not. Nor was she referring to Bernard of Clairvaux, Modomnoc, Valentine, Godnait or even Bridget.
So I gave up. I ceded superior knowledge and cried uncle.
With undisguised glee, my sister read aloud the entire article as it appeared in the Portland-Press Herald, datelined from Blagoevgrad. It relates how on this day Orthodox Christian Bulgarians gather to celebrate the feast of St Haralambos, who is the patron of bees and honey, and also known as the “lord of illnesses”, a dubious distinction. The Bulgarian faithful place jars of honey and candles on the floor of their church in the shape of a cross. It is unclear what happens next, but I imagine it is weird and sticky. Why the only American paper to report on this Bulgarian festivity is in Portland Maine is a mystery for another day.
Distraught at being so humiliated in this hagiographic matter, I did some research. And for starters, I would like to point out that only in Bulgaria is he called Haralambos. Nor can I find any documentation of his patronage of bees. He was born in 89 CE in Magnesia, Greece, of which milk he drank. He was martyred 113 years later. In the rest of the world, or the parts of the world where they practice Eastern orthodox Christianity -

This program is interrupted because my daughter has just walked in, agitated.
“Mom, do you have a snot-sucker. Iggy just got a pea up his nose.”
“Not any more. I gave you the snot sucker*.”
“That was NoseFrida the Snotsucker. Don’t you have a plain old snot sucker with a bulb from when we were kids?"
“No. Those rubber bulbs get old and dried out.” All the dried up and old snot sucking bulbs have been thrown out in one of the recent purges. All the current residents of the house can pick their noses and remove their snot without any external suction.
Shrieks drift in from the other room.
“Never mind, he ejected it by himself. I have such a brilliant child.”

-so we can safely return to hagiography: The name is Charalampus. But my sister, who feels proprietary about this particular saint having brought him to attention, thinks Charalampus sounds silly, as contrasted with Haralambos. There is no adequate response to such an assertion.

*It is perhaps worth pointing out that the very same sister who knows so much about Haralambos gave me the marvelous NoseFrida device, which I then gave to my daughter. For obvious reasons.

R.I.P. West Athens Parade and Happy Anniversary Cuban Blockade

The news came from my sister at the first glimmer of dawn today: The West Athens 4th of July parade has been cancelled this year.
My sister who lives in Maine does an excellent job keeping us apprised of hot news in Maine that may not be fit to print in the New York Times, but which she knows will be of compelling interest to CSB and me; items such as the possible closing of the Caratunk Post office (tragic) or the rescue of the Good Will-Hinkley School, by a grant from the Alfond Foundation (good news) or the infestation of the Admiral Peary Historic Site on Eagle Island by rabid lemmings (unsure).
And since she knows how religiously we attend the West Athens Fourth of July Parade she knew we would need to know immediately. This is a terrible loss for creative counter culture, for the marijuana industry of central Maine, for coolers filled with lite beer, for Tattoo Pride of Maine, and for devotees of burning rubber. But we suspected this was coming.
The parade began about 40 years ago with a group of hippies and back-to-the-land, off-the-gridders got together to celebrate Independence in their own way. The floats featured raucous political satire, arcane cultural commentary and great costumes. Over time, alas, the focus shifted to inebriation, scanty costumes and burning rubber. If you, like me, have lived a sheltered life, chances are you have never witnessed so many trucks and ATV’s burning rubber on purpose. If you, like me, are clueless, then you have no idea why anyone would do this on purpose.
So with many fond memories and a few disclaimers, here are a few pictures from last year’s Fourth in West Athens.







In other news, I just received this email from my father.
On the television they mentioned the 50th anniversary of the Cuban blockade. Tell me what this is all about because I have lost this. Has this been good? Apparently other countries have dialogues with Cuba. Have we accomplished anything by continuing it? I don't know.

He can recall WW2 and the pony cart overturning as they went to first grade, but not this. And why should he?
I should note that he dictated this email and it was typed by his secretary, because the emails he types himself require creative translation. The emails he types himself look like those word verification gizmos to “prevent automated systems from adding spam”, and that may be why his offspring are quite good at deciphering Captcha and other forms of gibberish.
In case you are wondering, CAPTCHA is not a slang rendition of Captured ya (à la Gotcha) but an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart.
Also in case you are wondering, I wrote back to my father that no, the Cuban blockade has not been a good thing.

While most Americans with the Y chromosome, and many without, it were watching the Super Bowl, I was sorting through a pile of papers. And yes, I spend lots of time sorting through papers. Whenever I see an unsorted, unfiled pile of paper, especially with an assortment of print, handwriting and drawings, I am overcome by the urge to sort, file and puge. Papers and books beckon to me like heroin to a junkie, like Thunderbird to a wino, like one-armed bandits to a gambler, like holy water to a saint. Or you might call it a benign form of OCD.
Whence this particular pile of papers?
In the basement of the parental house (the very same basement I have plumbed and mined before for artifacts, and will again) there is a tall wooden cabinet (actually there are several tall wooden cabinets, but this one is green) that was there when my family moved into the house about fifty years ago. Before that my grandfather lived there, and until sometime in the 1930’s, he lived there with my grandmother. Then in the mid-1930’s she left piles of her unsorted papers in the deep drawers of this tall green wooden cabinet, and moved out and never lived there again.
So on yesterday morning I filled a couple of paper bags with these unsorted papers, and brought them back to New York to keep me out of trouble while CSB watched large men in impossibly tight pants run around a field in Indianapolis, an area once inhabited by the Lenape and Miami tribes, a fact which always causes confusion when a Miami that is not in Florida is mentioned.
Here are some of the delectable items gleaned:
• Prospectus for the Happy Valley Association, founded by Annie Besant 1936
• Prospectus from the Sufi Movement, NY Branch
• Several copies of The American Theosophist, 1932, 1933
• Two copies International Psychic Gazette

• A flyer advertising Swedish Massage and Corrective gymnastics in Miami, FL
• Stationary from the Hotel Astoria in Leningrad
• Acte de Concession Perpétuelle de terrain de Cimetiere, regarding the sepulcher for Constant Toissaint Lévêque, my great-grandfather, in the department of Manche, in the Arrondissment of Cherbourg, in the canton of Guettehou, in the Mairie of St Vaast-la-Hogue, made to my grandmother in April of 1931, signed, stamped, and stamped again by the notary of St Vaast-la-Hogue, upon receipt of 10 % of 450 francs.
• An article about St. Louis Estes and the many children he fathered in his 70’s.
While most of the papers make some kind of sense, I am often bewildered by the articles that my grandmother chose to neatly cut from newspapers or magazines, and save. What interested her?
Why did she carefully remove the article and accompanying photograph about the 72 year-old St. Louis Estes, the dentist and raw food advocate who was so pleased with himself for having sired numerous children in his later years? He and his much younger wife spawned ten children in 15 years. Their arrangement was that she named the girls (Esther, Dimple, Natasha, Suzanne and Dixie Lou) and he named the boys (St. Louis II, III, IV, V, and VI). The Estes’s employed the last surviving member of the Silesian royal family, Prince de Vigni, to tutor their children, who exclusively wore bathing suits all year round. Luckily for them, they lived in southern California. St Louis claimed to have been bald before switching to a raw food diet. But now he has wavy silver tresses.
There is nothing intrinsically unusual about this story. There is only the question of why she saved it. Did she know St. Louis Estes or someone like him? Did she find him appealing? What did she think of a raw food diet? I assume that, as a Frenchwoman, she would not approve. Would she have preferred to have more than two children?
I can’t answer any of the above questions. All I can do is Google St Louis Estes, and learn that though he lived to be 75, in interviews he lied and claimed to be 15 years older than his true age. After slipping and falling by the swimming pool in 1951, Dr. Estes went into a coma and died. The autopsy report cited “Malnutrition” as an auxiliary cause of death.

Another tiny piece of paper, a short paragraph that fluttered into view after three quarters of a century inside a dark drawer, was titled “Use for Afterbirths”. It described how most animals eat their own afterbirths, and how Dr. Charles McKhann of Boston “gave a placentophagy a new twist” by extracting substances from the placenta and then using them to inoculate children against measles. That is certainly the first and only time I have encountered the word placentophagy, and discovering a word like that is better than the Super Bowl any day.

Magic Pink über-stylish Onion-Chopping goggles

It has come to SQD's attention that we don't do enough for the economy, which is to say that we rarely pitch products. In fact, we have never pitched a product because we don't like any products unless they were grown in the ground, emitted by a chicken, dropped from a tree or miraculously created by a saint.
But that is about to change.
SQD hereby endorses the Magic Pink über-stylish Onion-Chopping goggles. I don't need to explain the paramount attractiveness of the goggles, because you see that plainly in the above picture. But what the picture doesn't show - because there are none - are the tears not wept on the occasion of chopping all those onions. For the first time in a lifetime of lacrimose onion-chopping, your blogger did not blubber and her eyes did not sting and still the onions were chopped.

And yes, I had hitherto tried all sorts of other putative tear-prevention techniques, such as burning a candle or chopping under water or naked, or standing on one foot while listening to Wagner. Nothing worked like the Magic Pink über-stylish Onion-Chopping goggles.

Downton Abbey and H.G.Wells

Did you, like 99% of the civilized world, and 100% of the uncivilized world, watch the latest installment of Downton Abbey last night? No? Is it possible that you, like CSB and one or two other misguided souls, watched football instead? Or perhaps you played mah-jongg with your mother-in-law, or practiced Estonian irregular verbs, or prepared for that super-fun colonoscopy? Or perhaps you shoveled out the chicken coop because your chickens do not like getting their feet cold in the snow? Or perhaps you counted the ballast stones in the basement, for historical purposes, and found ossuary remains?
But if you did watch Downton Abbey chances are very good you are wondering: what would H. G. Wells have thought about this? What exactly was H.G. doing while the Crawleys are trying to hang on to their estate while remaining ignorant about the machinations of the wicked O’Brien and Thomas downstairs? (How can Cora, the American heiress, be so clueless about the nasty intriguing of her lady’s maid? Are we meant to think that because she is an American, she is less likely to be a good judge of the downstairs character?)
To begin:
DOWNton Abbey is a squarish pile of bricks and stone that is said to reside in Yorkshire, but is really Highclere Castle, seat of the Earls of Carnarvon, which is in Hampshire.

UPpark, where H.G.’s mother was housekeeper and where he sometimes stayed as a child, is a similarly squarish pile in Sussex. It is still there.
The grounds of Highclere Castle were designed by Capability Brown
The grounds of Uppark were landscaped by Humphry Repton.
The 5th Earl of Carnarvon was a passionate Egyptologist and colleague of Howard Carter; together they discovered the tomb of King Tut in 1922, spawning the Boy-King mega franchise responsible for chicken-like dance moves, a spike in gold paint sales and Disney’s Vinylmation 9” King Tut with mouse ears. My grandmother did not know Howard Carter, but she frequently visited digs around Cairo and I have a picture of her jauntily holding a 4000 year-old vase beside a tomb, which gives you an idea of how lax security was in those halcyon days of archeology.
Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh (pronounced “fa-ha”), who inherited Uppark in 1760, was a Regency buck and gave all indications of being a lifelong bachelor. Until the age of 70 when he married his 20-year old dairymaid, Mary Ann Bullock. Sir Harry sent her to Paris to learn some graces and lose her Sussex accent. She taught him everything she knew about milking cows and making butter. They lived happily together for 22 years, with Mary Ann’s sister Fanny as companion. Sir Harry died at 96. His much younger wife, Lady Fetherstonhaugh, stayed on at Uppark with her sister, keeping everything exactly as it was in Sir Harry’s time. She survived him by 29 years; Fanny lived until 1895. Fanny Bullock first hired Sarah Neal, mother of the not yet world famous H.G. Wells, as her maid. They were the same age and of similar backgrounds. Then in 1880 Fanny asked Sarah Neal to return to Uppark as housekeeper. Just like Mrs. Hughes. And that is how H.G. Wells came spend part of his childhood, downstairs at Uppark.

But the comparisons do not stop there, not at all.
For instance, on August 4th, 1914, the Crawley family is hosting an elegant garden party on the grounds of Downton, when the Earl receives a telegram informing him that Britain has gone to war.
On that same day, H.G. Wells and his family and houseguests walked to the annual fete hosted by Lady Warwick. Also on that same day, H.G.’s son by Rebecca West (26 years younger* and not his wife) is born.
There is more.
At Downton Abbey Lady Mary’s lover, the Turkish attaché Mr. Pamuk, dies in her bed, and scandal hovers in the air.
In London, Hedwig Gatternigg, a past lover of H.G.’s, bursts into his flat, throws open her coat to reveal that she is naked beneath, and brandishes a knife. She threatens to kill herself if H.G. does not make love to her immediately. Scandal hovers in the air.
Both H.G. and Lady Mary are saved by quick-thinking servants.

The Earl of Grantham marries an American heiress in order to save his family’s estate.
H.G. Wells has an affair with Margaret Sanger, the American pioneer of birth control.

It is a crisis at Downton Abbey when, because of the war, there is not an available footman to serve at dinner. And we all know how tacky it is to have dinner served by a female of the species.
In his novel Kipps, H.G. Wells writes of the young Mr. and Mrs. Kipps who want to build a house that is efficient and servant-friendly, that is, in which the housemaid needn’t run up and down stairs all day long. Their good intentions are thwarted.

The driving force of Downton Abbey’s plot is the desire to retain ownership of the family pile despite the entail.
H.G. Wells was a member of the Fabians for many years, a friend of Maxim Gorky, and a lifelong Socialist.
So if the question is: How would H.G. Wells have liked "Downton Abbey"? The answer is: he would have loved it.


*Rebecca West was born in 1892, the same year my other grandmother was born, not the one holding 4000 year old vases, but the one who read H.G. Wells and only H.G. Wells over and over for the last three decades of her life.

Rollerskating in the cloisters

In the annals of unwanted gifts mothers give their sons, this is hardly the worst. My son would probably rank it several notches above the desktop croquet set or lifetime membership to the Hagiographers Club or the plaid vest with antler buttons. Still, it is disconcerting to read the inscription: To Phil, Christmas 1949, love Mother, on the flyleaf of this book, filled with vignettes of the paranormal, the weird, the impossible, and the miraculous. It is hard to imagine what would interest Phil, the man who was not yet my father, less than the paranormal, weird and miraculous tales contained therein, except perhaps his horoscope or membership in his local Theosophical Society. It speaks volumes of the gap between mother and son.
But ill-considered gifts are not the true topic of this particular screed. The true topic may well be the same old topic, which is: It is a Good Idea to Keep Books, no matter how weird and random and useless they appear. (And yes, there are always exceptions.) As in this book, which has probably been in the basement since that Christmas of 1949. This time it is Patrick Mahony’s Out of the Silence, (1948 edition, Storm Publishers). If the generic title does not intrigue you, continue on to the subtitle: A Book of Factual Fantasies.
Given my fondness for lives of the paranormal, weird, impossible and miraculous saints, it seems logical that I would be compelled. Equally compelling, the introduction was written by Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), the Belgian writer who was also a beekeeper and wrote the exquisite The Life of the Bee, in which he goes into raptures about the sexual adventures of the queen bee. It is true that MM is probably better known for his plays, particularly, Pelléas and Mélisande, and receiving the Nobel Prize, but think it is The Life of the Bee that will endure. So I sat among the dusty pages and read Out of the Silence.*
I read about the Vennums of Watseka, Illinois and how their daughter Lurancy had a cataleptic fit and then turned into the dead daughter of a family across town, the Roffs. Her transformation was so absolute that all agreed she should move in with the Roffs. They were happy to have their dead daughter back. Then a year later Lurancy, now Mary Roff, had another cataleptic fit and turned back into Lurancy Vennum.
I read about the French teacher in Latvia whose astral projection picked flowers while she was teaching irregular verbs in the classroom.
I read about the brother-in-law’s ghost spelling the word F-O-R-E-V-E-R in the sand.
But this is where it all came together: Mahony relates how when Maeterlinck and his lover Georgette LeBlanc lived at the Abbey of St Wandrille, they encountered the ghost of a monk Bernard who had died in 1693, and how they discovered his bones inside a secret room. (That’s the “factual fantasy”.)
It so happens that I had read about Maeterlinck’s stay in that monastery when I was reading his Life of the Bee.
[Saints will now be mentioned, but very little.It is really just one saint, and more about architecture.] Saint Wandrille or Wandregisilus (d. 668) was born near Verdun and from his earliest years was determined to be a monk. However, to please his parents he married, but went to on to have a chaste marriage. (Depending on the version: it is also said that Wandrille and his bride were the parents of St Landrada, which implies they were not entirely chaste.) The bride is heard from no more, and Wandrille went into a monastery. Around 657 he built the Abbey and a basilica in the Carolingian style. The church burned to the ground in 756 but was later rebuilt in another style. In the 9th century the abbey was the frequent target of Viking raids, and was burned again. This time the monks grabbed St Wandrille’s bones and fled the flames. The church and abbey were restored in the 10th century and proceeded to have several good centuries; it was the heyday of monasteries. One of the many privileges afforded to the good monks was an exemption from river tolls on the Seine.
Then, in 1631, the central tower fell with no warning and crushed large sections of the abbey. During the Revolution the abbey was suppressed, and sold for auction in 1791. Several more bad years followed when it was used as a factory. But then George Stacpoole, a quirky Irishman hoping to ingratiate himself with the pope, bought the abbey and lived there until 1896. On his death, he gave the property to the French Benedictines, but they were expelled by the French government in 1901 and had to seek exile in Belgium. Then – and this is the time that especially concerns us – Maurice Maeterlinck rented the abbey from 1907 to 1914, and lived there with his lover Georgette LeBlanc.** According to Mahony they entertained lavishly and rehearsed many of his plays. This is Georgette when she is not dressed as a nun.
Mahony does not mention Maurice and Georgette dressing up as monks and nuns and roller-skating through the vast courtyards and cloisters and halls of St Wandrille. Nor does he mention Maeterlinck’s bees.
In 1931 the Benedictines got the monastery back and they are still there, praying in silence and being hospitable to visitors, but given the history of the abbey, we hope that the monks have a plan B.

This block of 1951 stamps of St Wandrille Abbey sold on eBay for $13.00 on the last day of last year.




*Not to be confused with Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time to Keep Silence, in which he describes his stay with the monks of St Wandrille Abbey.

**I can highly recommend Georgette’s memoir, Souvenirs: My Life with Maeterlinck, in which she recounts how she stalked and seduced and landed Maeterlinck as her lover.